Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democratic
Plantation
Candace Owens
Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Review by Tadashi Hama
American political commentator Candace Owens elaborates in her first book her thoughts
on what is wrong with black America. Owens had a very large audience before
publication of this book—several hundred thousand YouTube subscribers and several
million Twitter followers. It is difficult to tell how many of these really agree with her,
but at the very least, if anyone has seen her speak, she is a force of nature. She will
vigorously defend herself without pleasantries. Indeed, during a House committee
hearing on so-called hate crimes, Owens, the sole black conservative invited to speak,much to the dismay of the Democratic majority, put aside niceties and gave committee
members, including grim-faced Taiwanese Representative Ted Lieu1 who initiated theattack, an earful on their feeble attempt to smear her as a “nazi”.2
Owens identifies as a conservative—a black American conservative. Those who feed
exclusively on mainstream media will regurgitate the media narrative, in thatconservatives are white capitalist, gun-loving Christians. Furthermore, according toconventional wisdom, American conservatives are anti-immigration and nationalist; thevery definition of a “bigot” and “fascist”. People deeply seeped in the dominant media
narrative, including people such as grim-faced Representative Lieu, unceasingly nag
America of how horrible conservatives are and how these “bigots” and “fascist” are animminent threat to American democracy, that is, the Leftist vision of “Americandemocracy”. A black American identifying as a conservative, however, invites not only
hate but derision—surely this black person is slightly mentally unbalanced!3
It is imperative that commentators clearly state what is meaningful—and Owens clearlyspells out what is important to her: true liberalism (i.e. classical liberalism4) based on“liberty and equality before the law”. True liberalism, Owens states, “pursues principles
like the right to life, right to vote, freedom of speech” and so on. These principles in turn,In 2015, after a trip to the People’s Republic of China, Representative Lieu was “convinced” that the CCP
was “as eager as the United States to avoid politically damaging intellectual-property theft.”https://www.dailydot.com/debug/china-cybercrime-cybersecurity-deal-ted-lieu-congress-interview/. This
year’s news on the FBI’s webpage concerning CCP espionage in the US undermine Mr. Lieu’s assertion.
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-china-threat2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZswuCGPwM
1

3

https://news.yahoo.com/column-im-black-larry-elder-120059254.html
An explanation of classical liberalism (“true liberalism”) deserves more than Owens’ one-sentencesummary, not only in understanding her thinking but also to view the extent to which the word “liberalism”
has been tortured by orthodox academics and the Marxist socio-political elite:
https://dwightdmurphey.com/monographs/the-principles-of-classical-liberalism/4

“guarantee” a “society with more individual freedom.” Thus, if there is no “liberty” andno “equality before the law”, then there can be no conservatism (i.e. “true” liberalism),and she will have none of it.
To Owens, then, her enemies are Leftists, who despise liberty and “equality before thelaw”—Leftists seek “to infringe upon individual liberties in [their] demand for a higher
moral good.” She points out the obvious, that “moral goodness is of course, subjective,”
but to Leftists, their idea of “moral goodness” is the only one that matters. One cannot
miss the dichotomy between conservatives and Leftists unless one has been sleeping in acave during the so-called coronavirus pandemic of the past two years. Leftist government
bureaucrats in every liberal democracy, aided by a thoroughly compliant media,demanded businesses shut down, everyone wear a face mask (then two), get treated withrecombinant mRNA not once but up to four times and to stop socializing under penalty ofimprisonment. These are the bitter fruits of the Leftists’ pursuit of a “higher moral good”.
Furthermore, true to form, government bureaucrats in liberal democracies treated those
who questioned fundamental scientific and moral bases of their dictates, those who
actually value liberty and equality over so-called moral good, as thought criminals.
Owens does not touch on the socioeconomic disaster that characterized the liberal
democracies’ response to the coronavirus “pandemic” in her current book, but she may
yet do so in her next book.
While embracing true liberalism, Owens also rejects “the victim narrative,” in that one’s
life is entirely based on the whims of some vague externality that appears every single
time. For example, the Left claims that today’s black Americans are a “permanentunderclass” due to “institutional racism” and “oppression”. The Left further claims thattoday’s blacks are still feeling “the lingering effects” of black slavery, which ended 160years ago. A corollary to this is that today’s whites are responsible for pain and suffering
caused by their slave-owning ancestors, from over 160 years ago, and are therefore liable
for reparations.5 Owens believes that the only way blacks can advance themselves, is forthem to assume responsibility over their own lives, and to reject “the victim narrative”.
This piece of trenchant advice, of course, applies to all American ethnic groups—people
should stop dwelling in a past that no longer exists and build for the future. However, inAmerica, and perhaps in other countries with minute ethnic minorities, the victim
narrative has taken root like a particularly insidious weed and it will take herculean effort
to get rid of it.
As Owens points out, it is Leftists who exclusively “glorifies” victimhood. Indeed,Owens further states that the Left, as personified by the Democratic Party, manipulates
American blacks by harping on their alleged eternal victimization at the hands of whites,that as long as they are a “permanent underclass” only the Democratic Party can save

5When accepting this line of logic, one needs to completely forget that most whites, even Southern whites,
never owned slaves. About 25% of Southern whites owned slaves (L. Scruggs, The Un-Civil War, 2011).
Also, one will have to completely ignore the lives of former American slaves as documented duringFranklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration: Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration,
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States form Interviews with Former Slaves, 1941.

2them.6 The Democratic Party is the “political group that champions leftist solutions…”
and claims that only it can “rescue” black Americans. Owens points out that the so-called
progressive polices of the Democrats, rather than helping, ends up harming blackAmericans. Owens states that blacks need to get out of the “Democratic plantation” by
rejecting the Democratic Party’s characterization of blacks as eternal victims and assume
more responsibility for their lives. Only then will black Americans rise above theircurrent state as a “permanent underclass”. Indeed, Owens has started a movement,BLEXIT (“black + exit”) to get blacks to reject the Leftist dogma and the Democratic
Party and to embrace conservative principles.
Owen’s book is engaging at times but other times lacking. She points out that Native
Americans were truly savage, practicing cannibalism, enslaving and torturing captured
enemies, well before the appearance of Europeans, which is rarely stated by the media,
for fear of offending Native Americans. However, she goes on at length, as others have,on how “racist” the Democrats were and how Republicans were saviors of black peopleat the end of the so-called American Civil War.7 In fact, the Radical Republicans used
black militias to terrorize blacks and whites in the devastated South during theReconstruction era, with the overall objective of keeping themselves and their big
business cronies in power.8 We read elsewhere that the Democratic Party of the 1800’s
was actually the party that believed, as Owens does, in “true liberalism” and that theRadical Republicans quashed the rights of Southerners in order to achieve their own“higher moral good”.9Owens is nonetheless extremely proud of being a black American—she is fully aware of
the horrible standards of living are in black African countries—and chides those wholament how hard it is for black people in “racist” America—non-whites continue flood“racist America”, in ever increasing numbers, nonetheless.
With respect to immigrants wearing faux indignity on one’s sleeve, and sometimes on aface mask, Haitian-Japanese-American tennis player Naomi Osaka was “ranked secondin the world before entering the 2020 Tokyo Olympics” and a proud supporter of BlackLives Matters and George Floyd, both of which Owens despises, with reason. TheOwens words should not be limited to black Americans. Ironically, as one of America’s socioeconomically successful minorities, Japanese-Americans act as if they are still victims of white supremacist
and Democratic Franklin Roosevelt, who ordered those of Japanese ancestry to leave the western US. To
thoughtful Japanese Americans who no longer want to masquerade as victims, they would do themselves afavor by reviewing “The Relocation of the Japanese Americans During World II,” in D. Murphey, The
Dispossession of the American Indian – And Other Key Issues in American History, 1995.
https://dwightdmurphey.com/essay-3-the-relocation-of-the-japanese-americans-during-world-war-ii/
7
D. D’Souza, Hillary’s America, 2016. Also, Republican President Abraham Lincoln sought to send all
American blacks out to Africa, Haiti or Central America--“anywhere but the United States” (T. DiLarenzo,The Real Lincoln, 2002).
8
L.M. Scruggs, The Un-Civil War, 2011.
9Owen raises lynching, in context of Democrats lynching black “Republican” following the so-called Civil
War. Political commentator Dwight Murphey has explored the evidence using Leftist sources, and white
men and women, as well as blacks, were lynched under a number of circumstances. Parceling out who did
what to whom is apparently beyond the work of competent journalists. See:
https://dwightdmurphey.com/monographs/lynching-history-and-analysis-a-legal-studies-monograph/63

Japanese media of course fawned and tripped all over themselves in welcoming Osaka as
one of their own, as a step-sister, to the Tokyo Olympics. After Osaka’s less than stellar
showing in Tokyo, as a representative of Japan, and in tournaments thereafter, theJapanese media has apparently quietly moved on, looking for its next step-child.
Nonetheless, Osaka smiles down upon her partially genetic kin, from advertisements at
subway stations and in subway cars in Japan. One wonder what Owens thinks about all
this?

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